The web has been bursting at the seams with infographic bloat for about a year now. Sadly, the lion’s share of these ‘infographics’ are nothing more than link-bait garbage, some stats represented in Illustrator instead of Excel.

But there’s WAY more to infographics – just check out these bad boys.

The first video, above, is of Francesco Franchi, art director of IL (Intelligence in Lifestyle), the monthly magazine of Il Sole 24 ORE. (Actually this video just touches on the amazing work he does on that magazine, so for further-reading amazingness, check out IL’s flickr feed and its Facebook page’s photo album).

As Franchi explains, what we’re exploring here is “a new language, a visual journalism that combines graphic and narrative.”

The second video is a TED presentation by Jer Thorp, whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Guardian and the New York Times (where I believe he currently works).

Thorp’s approach is more from the coding/data end than Franchi’s design-led approach, but both come to similar conclusions.

No mistake that these guys both work for print newspapers – I’m increasingly coming round to the perspective that the bootstrapping for creative/business that print media instills is pretty hard to beat. (ahem – I was doing infographics in 2005…)